FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #235

Harry Nilsson - 20 Years...

When the World Lost a Touch of Schmilsson
Harry Nilsson died twenty years ago today.

Aaron Goldstein
15 January 2014

Before I woke up on the morning of January 15, 1994, I had the most vivid dream. In this dream, Harry Nilsson was standing right in front of me. His heart was melting and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

My own heart leapt into my throat when I learned later that day Nilsson had died of heart failure. My dream completely spooked me out.

I would be spooked out again 48 hours later when an earthquake hit Los Angeles that measured 6.7 on the Richter scale. My Dad had arrived in L.A. the previous evening for a visit to his eldest sister. Fortunately, he was not the worse for wear. Interestingly, shortly after his arrival Dad asked my aunt, “When earthquakes occur what time of the day do they usually take place?” “About 6 a.m.,” my aunt replied. So sure enough when the earthquake happened Dad awoke and said, “Oh, it must be 6 a.m.” He then promptly went back to sleep.

While my father was in bed during the L.A. earthquake, Nilsson was being laid to rest. Apparently he wasn’t going gently. As Alyn Shipton wrote in his 2013 biography Nilsson: The Life of a Singer-Songwriter, “More than one mourner at the graveside joked that the earthquake and its aftershocks were the consequence of Nilsson getting to heaven and finding the bars closed.” To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, “When God turns a singer loose on the world, the earth trembles.”

All things considered, it is amazing that Nilsson lived for as long as he did given the copious amounts of cigarettes, cocaine, and cognac he consumed. As Eric Idle of Monty Python fame noted in the 2010 documentary Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?), “He spent most of his life in pursuit of a good time and he caught it and it caught him in the end.”

Although the documentary and the biography as well as last year’s re-release of his entire RCA catalogue have helped Nilsson remain in the recesses of public consciousness, his inconspicuous consumption was such that he is best remembered by some as John Lennon’s drinking buddy who got him thrown out of the Troubadour after they heckled the Smothers Brothers in the midst of Lennon’s “Lost Weekend.” To the extent, Nilsson is remembered for his music it is for songs he didn’t write namely “Everybody’s Talkin” (Fred Neil) and “Without You” (Pete Ham and Tom Evans of Badfinger).

But the people who do remember Nilsson’s music know why the Beatles considered him their favorite artist. Songs like the autobiographical “1941,” the now politically incorrect “Ten Little Indians” and his interpretation of Beatles songs like “You Can’t Do That” and “She’s Leaving Home” from his Pandemonium Shadow Show album caught the ears of the Fab Four with his incisive lyrics, clever arrangements, and his three and a half octave range.)

Nilsson recorded some of the most original albums of the second half of the 20th century.Nilsson Sings Newman, The Point! and A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night were ahead of their time and remain so to this day. Recording an album of Randy Newman songs might not seem like a daring thing to do, but it was in 1970 when Newman was relatively unknown. Nilsson’s interpretation of songs like “Vine Street,” “I’ll Be Home,” and “Cowboy” with a little help from Newman on piano would give Newman’s recording career the kick start it needed.

On the surface, The Point! appears to be a children’s album. But that would miss the point. Nilsson tells the story about the land of Point where everyone and everything has a point; everyone that is except for a little boy named Oblio. Because of his condition, Oblio and his dog Arrow are banished to The Pointless Forest. Songs like “Me and My Arrow,” “Think About Your Troubles,” and “Life Line” help tell the story. The Point! was subsequently adapted into an animated film which over the years has been narrated by the likes of Dustin Hoffman, Ringo Starr, and Robin Thicke’s Dad.

Standards albums are, well, standard fare these days. But in 1973 the idea of a rock star recording an album of standards was square. Richard Perry, who had produced the hit albums Nilsson Schmilsson and Son of Schmilsson, wanted no part of a standards album. Derek Taylor, the man who introduced The Beatles to Nilsson, had no such reservations. Nilsson and Taylor recruited arranger Gordon Jenkins who had worked with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald. The result was A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night which included songs such as “It Had to Be You,” Irving Berlin’s “What’ll I Do?” and “As Time Goes By.”

I must confess that I didn’t always get Nilsson’s musical sensibilities. When I first heard A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night nearly 30 years ago, I was so put off by it that I demanded that my mother turn it off. She acquiesced. But as soon as I turned off I felt badly. I had acted like a teenaged brat and had struck a sour note.

In the years that followed, my ears opened and matured. Nilsson was an acquired taste, but I grew to appreciate the sheer variety of his music and I am glad to say I was able to appreciate his work while he was still alive and have shared that enthusiasm with others.

Occasionally, this enthusiasm has been reciprocated albeit sometimes reluctantly. The year after Nilsson’s death a tribute album titled For the Love of Harry: Everybody Sings Nilsson was released. Canadian folk singer Ron Sexsmith contributed with “Good Old Desk” to For the Love of Harry.

When I saw Sexsmith perform at the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa back in 1999, he told the audience he would play requests. I immediately requested “Good Old Desk.” Sexsmith replied that it had to be song he wrote. But I wouldn’t let it go. Eventually, Sexsmith gave in and played the song. It soon became apparent why he was so reluctant to play “Good Old Desk.” He went blank in the middle of the second verse. Fortunately, I was there to save him when I shouted, “Such a comfort to know.” Sexsmith finished the song and there was much joy and merriment. So for several years after that night, every time I would see Ron Sexsmith in concert I would request “Good Old Desk.” He did not forget the lyrics again.

A few years back, the Toronto based indie band The Golden Dogs (which at one time included my younger brother Micah) played “Me and My Arrow” when I attended a couple of their gigs in Boston. I also remember a young musician dedicating “Mournin’ Glory Story” to me during an open mike night at Club Passim in Cambridge. Had I not embraced the music of Nilsson then none of these stories would have come to pass and I would be the poorer for it.

Twenty years have now passed since the earth trembled and lost of a touch of Schmilsson. I will continue to do my part to turn Harry Nilsson’s music loose on the world.

http://spectator.org/articles/57423/when-world-lost-touch-schmilsson

Jimmy Webb Wednesday Part II

Old Photographs of New York

Constructing Brooklyn Bridge, 1914


Constructing 28th Street, 1930


Third Avenue Elevated Train


View from the George Washington Bridge, 1936


"Naxi Army Now 75 Miles From Paris." Corner of Sixth Avenue and 40th Street, 1941



42nd Street, circa 1890


Delancey Street, 1908


Grand Central Station, 1937


Construction of the Manhattan Bridge, 1908


Murder victim syuffed in a fuel drum, Brooklyn, 1918


Astoria Public Pool, 1940


Lower East Side during the 1930s

http://www.nyc.gov/html/records/html/gallery/home.shtml

Dave Van Ronk - The Mayor of MacDougal Street

Inside Llewyn Davis: the book behind the Coen brothers film
Bob Dylan called him his first New York muse, yet Dave Van Ronk never gained the recognition he deserved. Inside Llewyn Davis draws on his story

Richard Williams
The Guardian

Friday 10 January 2014

Poor Dave Van Ronk. He was in the right place – the Greenwich Village coffee-house scene – at the right time, doing all the right things, singing the right songs to the right people. But he just didn't have the magic. And he didn't have the luck, either.

Sometime in the 1950s, when he was a young man trying to become a folk singer, he had learned a traditional song called "House of the Rising Sun" from a pre-war field recording on which it was sung without accompaniment by a Kentucky miner's teenage daughter. Van Ronk changed it around a bit, keeping the tune and most of the words, but adding a distinctive chord sequence that made an already plaintive lament even more arresting. As his reputation grew, it became the highlight of his stage act. "It was Dave's song," a witness to the era recalled. "He owned it."

One night in 1962, a younger singer approached him with a request. "Hey, Dave,"Bob Dylan said, "would it be OK for me to record your version of 'House of the Rising Sun'?" Dylan had just signed a recording contract with a major company, while Van Ronk was preparing his own debut for a small folk label.

"Jeez, Bobby," he replied, "I'm going into the studio to do that myself in a few weeks. Can't it wait until your next album?"

"Uh-oh," Dylan said, immediately arousing Van Ronk's suspicions.

"What exactly do you mean, 'Uh-oh'?"

"Well," an embarrassed Dylan said, "I've already recorded it."

So he had, and the song became a key track on his first album, which reached only a limited audience that year but helped lay the foundations of his career. "House of the Rising Sun" was its most immediately striking track; on both sides of the Atlantic, aspiring folk singers even younger than Dylan avidly learned the song from his recording.

For Van Ronk there was no credit, and there were certainly no royalties. There was only the measure of grim satisfaction that came three years later when the Animals copied Dylan's recording and took "House of the Rising Sun" to No 1 in the US and UK pop charts, crediting the arrangement to their organist, Alan Price. Now Dylan himself could no longer perform the song, because people would assume he had stolen it from the British group.

Van Ronk told the story in his autobiography, The Mayor of MacDougal Street. Published in 2005, three years after his death at the age of 65, it describes the glory days of the Village, and is full of amusing character studies and pungent opinions. It also forms the platform on which the film directors Joel and Ethan Coen constructed their latest film, Inside Llewyn Davis, a portrait of a New York singer during the period in which folk was taking over from jazz as the music of the hip intelligentsia.

The Coens' focus is sharp. The time is early 1961 and the streets of the Village are covered with snow. Folk singers who can't afford winter coats perform in starkly furnished coffee houses to audiences of college students swiftly discovering alternatives to conventional Eisenhower-era ideas of progress towards adulthood. This is a world in which idealism battles against careerism, and, in the case of Llewyn Davis, a veneer of one barely conceals a core of the other.

Most of those seeing the film's title for the first time will think of Dylan, who branded his new identity with a Welsh poet's name. Those scenes set in the snow-covered Village streets are a direct translation of the cover photograph from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, the 1963 album with which the singer's career began to take off. And, rather naughtily, the cinema trailer is set to a soundtrack of Dylan's "Farewell".

But Llewyn Davis is not Bob Dylan. He is not Dave Van Ronk, either, despite the borrowing of mood, texture and many salient incidents fromThe Mayor of MacDougal Street. But he does occupy a place that history reserved for Van Ronk, as the man who preceded Bob Dylan and was destined to find himself completely overshadowed.

At 20, Dylan was only four years younger than Van Ronk when he arrived in New York in January 1961, but it was a significant four years: one was a pre-war baby, the other a baby boomer. Different sensibilities, different expectations. Dylan had come from Minnesota and was intent on escaping the comfortable existence offered by a stable, relatively prosperous family and remaking his life, starting with the invention of a colourful backstory for the benefit of his new friends and new audiences.

Van Ronk had actually lived the sort of life Dylan made up. Born in Brooklyn to parents of Swedish origin who separated soon after his birth, he never knew his father and "never felt a twitch of curiosity about him". His mother, a stenographer, shared the job of bringing him up with a succession of aunts, one of whom had been a rum-runner for the gangster Legs Diamond and managed a speakeasy during prohibition. "She loved jazz," Van Ronk writes, "and in that house the radio was always playing: Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Count Basie …"

Later in childhood he would spend time with a grandfather who had been a hotel pianist and could play "The Maple Leaf Rag". His Brooklyn-Irish grandmother was a great singer, and taught him songs that would become staples of the folk repertoire. (It was to one of her favourites, "The Chimes of Trinity", that Dylan would pay particular attention: "He made me sing it for him a few times until he had the gist of it, then reworked it into 'Chimes of Freedom'. Her version was better.")

By the time Van Ronk got to high school he had decided to become a musician, and increasingly regular visits from the truant officer put an end to his formal education at the age of 15. By then he had acquired a ukulele and learned his first blues, "St James Infirmary", from a copy ofThe Fireside Book of Folk Songs kept on another aunt's piano. The first guitar came in a schoolyard swap, and Van Ronk devoted himself to mastering the instrument, a task made more demanding by having been forced in childhood to "correct" his natural left-handedness. Lessons came from a neighbour who had played guitar with Jean Goldkette's band, and had known Bix Beiderbecke.

In his teens when he made his first visit to Greenwich Village, Van Ronk was expecting to find "half-timbered Tudor cottages with mullioned windows and thatched roofs, inhabited by bearded, bomb-throwing anarchists, poets, painters and nymphomanics". He was shocked, as he emerged from the West 4th Street subway station, to discover something that looked disconcertingly like Brooklyn.

Nevertheless, the Village became his natural home, a place of kindred musical, political and social spirits where he could drop by the White Horse Tavern to hear Dylan Thomas read his poems, spend afternoons at the Five Spot listening to Thelonious Monk rehearsing with John Coltrane, or make friends with surviving exponents of early jazz, whose wisdom he absorbed as he began playing with Dixieland bands in and around New York. In between times there were spells as a merchant seaman and road trips across America.

The switch from jazz hound to folknik came after Van Ronk had acquired the habit of spending Sunday afternoons in Washington Square Park, listening to kids with banjos and guitars singing songs they had learned at "progressive" summer camps. One of them taught him the art of fingerpicking. For Van Ronk, it was "a change that defied the general rule that things evolve from the simple to the more complex.

"In this case I made a move that was technically retrogressive, but it was about the only thing I could do to survive … much as I loved traditional jazz, I was sick to death of performing the music of King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton for drunken undergraduates who wanted us to put on funny hats and sing 'Yes, Sir, That's My Baby'."

But elements of his background clung to his new identity, and even after he embraced the folk repertoire – soaking up the material collected on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, sitting at the feet of Mississippi John Hurt and the Rev Gary Davis – his own performances featured a broader swath of material than most of his contemporaries could muster, played with a greater musical sophistication. "The joke in the early 1960s," he recalled, "was that I was the only folk singer in New York who knew how to play a diminished chord." This turned into a disadvantage when Dylan appeared, with an approach so tightly focused that it made the older man's eclecticism sound dated.

The folk world also suited Van Ronk's desire for political engagement. He joined the Trotskyite Young Socialist League and the International Workers of the World, and his apartment on Waverly Place became, as Suze Rotolo, then Dylan's girlfriend, recorded in her own memoir, A Freewheelin' Time, "the living room of a new generation of bohemians".

Other Village haunts of the folk crowd included the Cafe Bizarre, the Kettle of Fish, Gerde's Folk City, Izzy Young's Folklore Centre and the Gaslight, a coffee house in a Bleecker Street basement where the musicians – including Van Ronk and Dylan – were not paid but passed a collecting basket around the audience. In Rotolo's words, Van Ronk became its "gatekeeper": it was his job "to have the tourists stay in their seats for a few sets on a quiet night, or hustle them in and out quickly in order to take in as much money as possible on weekends." The Coens create a somewhat sanitised version of the Gaslight's ambience, with its small audience of rapt young listeners and highly variable cast of performers. ("Even in the dark," Van Ronk recalled, "the Gaslight was pretty horrible.")

As Llewyn Davis, a regular at the Coens' version of the club, Oscar Isaac sings, plays and wears a beard and battered clothes with commendable authenticity, blending aspects of several personalities, including Dylan's selfishness and ambition and Van Ronk's fate as a man who would never quite make it. An unsuccessful audition for a Chicago club owner is taken directly from Van Ronk's encounter with Albert Grossman, later to become Dylan's manager. The book is also the source of an amusing scene in which Davis tries to prise royalties from the tight-fisted owner of the small label on which his album has appeared.

A year or so after Dylan had "gone electric" and achieved pop success, Van Ronk briefly tried to follow suit with a band called the Hudson Dusters. No luck there, either. But he continued to perform and record, giving guitar lessons and encouragement to younger performers, until cancer surgery was followed by a fatal heart attack.

Unlike Dylan, Van Ronk never backed away from the political beliefs that he had espoused during the years when protest songs were spilling out of every Village coffee house. Interviewed for No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese's filmed portrait of Dylan's early years, he said of the man who usurped his position as the Village's leading troubadour: "We thought of him as hopelessly politically naive – but in retrospect he might have been more sophisticated than we were."

The scenes of Davis performing – and a fleeting glimpse of a younger rival – are a reminder of how that sophistication, or whatever it was, enabled Dylan to rise above and so swiftly distance himself from a parochial scene, his youthful intensity transforming traditional material in a way that Van Ronk – however impeccable his intentions and the quality of his performance – could never begin to match. Inside Llewyn Davis is not one man's story, but it proceeds from the pain of that historic disappointment.

• Inside Llewyn Davis is released on 24 January. Down in Washington Square, a collection of Van Ronk's recordings from 1958 to 2001 is on the Smithsonian Folkways label.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/10/inside-llewyn-davis-dave-van-ronk

The Anthony van Dyck Show...

Why Anthony van Dyck was Britain's first art star
The National Portrait Gallery is trying to drum up millions to buy a Van Dyck self-portrait. So why is this Belgian artist so important to British art history?

Jonathan Jones

the guardian.com

Monday 25 November 2013

£12.5m for a self-portrait by Anthony van Dyck? That's what the National Portrait Gallery and the Art Fund are trying to raise in an appeal launched today. Is it worth it?

Absolutely. I think this is one of the most worthwhile campaigns in years to "save" a work of art for the nation. Van Dyck's Self-Portrait would make a spectacular addition to the National Portrait Gallery. Quite frankly, it could make the place. It would give a gallery stuffed with pictures of primarily historical interest a true artistic masterpiece, by the man from Antwerp who gave birth to British art.

Van Dyck was fascinated by the English face. His paintings are full of pale faces, with quirky physiognomies and flaccid skin – the faces of the English upper class in the reign of Charles I. You can see how intrigued he was by this northern island just by looking at his portrait of the art collector George Gage doing business in Italy. Van Dyck shows this elegant art lover as a quintessential Englishman abroad, his long white hands and face looking raw and even sickly in the light of Rome.

Charles I ruled over an art-loving court and Van Dyck, a painter who could and did work all over Europe, came to Britain to get paid for portraits. His images of Stuart ladies and gentlemen have immense panache and cavalier style. They are at once real and down to earth – those pasty faces – yet magnificent in their silken garments and rich settings.

When British art took off in the 18th century, it was Van Dyck that artists like Gainsborough looked back to as the father of British painting –Gainsborough's painting The Blue Boy is his tribute to his art hero.

The painting the National Portrait Gallery wants to buy is the last known self-portrait by Van Dyck. He was very conscious of his talent – this portrait shows it. He stands sideways to the mirror he is looking at while he paints, and turns his head lightly towards it in a nonchalant, aristocratic pose.

Yet his world was falling apart. This was painted in 1640 to 1641 as Britain descended into a civil war that would leave many of Van Dyck's subjects and patrons, including Charles I, dead.

Meanwhile, Van Dyck himself had died by December 1641. The king said – as praise – that he spent all his money living "more like a prince than a painter".

Van Dyck was Britain's first art star. For once, a campaign to save a painting is not just hype. This gifted Flemish student of the English face belongs in this country, at the National Portrait Gallery, among all those people whose bad skin and bad teeth and cockeyed smiles he had such a good eye for.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2013/nov/25/van-dyck-national-portrait-gallery

National Portrait Gallery launches campaign to keep Van Dyck in UK
Poet Andrew Motion and artist Gillian Wearing back NPG's fundraising effort to buy £12.5m self-portrait of Flemish painter

Mark Brown
theguardian.com
Monday 25 November 2013

A £12.5m fundraising campaign to buy for the nation a work that ranks as one of the finest of all self-portraits has been launched by the National Portrait Gallery in London.

The Van Dyck portrait, painted a year before he died in 1641, will leave the UK for an anonymous private collection unless the money is raised.

The largest fundraising campaign for a work of art the gallery has undertaken is a reflection of the work's importance, said the NPG director Sandy Nairne. "Yes it's a large sum but we are not daunted. We feel this is absolutely the right thing to do."

He said the self-portrait was up there with the best and no other painter had had such a dramatic impact on British portraiture as Anthony van Dyck. "He decisively turned it away from the stiff formal approach of Tudor and Jacobean painting developing a distinctive fluid, painterly style that was to dominate portraiture well into the 20th century," Nairne said.

This self-portrait shows the artist brimming with confidence and is all the more poignant given his death, at 42, so soon after he painted it.

The poet Sir Andrew Motion said it was a "beautiful and extraordinary" painting that should belong to everybody. "It is a picture that belongs to all of us because it is about something that all of us feel and worry about," he said.

The artist Gillian Wearing is also supporting the campaign. She said: "This is a fantastic and evocative Van Dyck self-portrait painting that would enrich our whole culture if it can be made available to the public."

A total of £1.2m has already been raised including a grant of £500,000 from the charity the Art Fund and £700,000 from the NPG's own portrait fund.

But the clock is ticking. The arts minister Ed Vaizey has placed on an export bar on the painting which gives the NPG three months to demonstrate a serious ability to raise the funds. If it does then the timescale will be extended.

It is a painting that has rarely been seen in public, part of the earl of Jersey's family collection for nearly 400 years. The NPG tried to buy it when it came up for auction in 2009 and it was instead bought by the London dealer Philip Mould and the US dealer Alfred Bader for £8.3m. They now have a £12.5m foreign buyer – hence the reason for the export bar.

The work, now on display at the NPG, is one of only three self-portraits Van Dyck painted while in Britain. One is in the Prado museum in Madrid and the other is owned by the duke of Westminster.

Van Dyck may have been Flemish but he was at the centre of English court life, invited to the country by his greatest patron, Charles I, in 1632. The artist was rewarded with a knighthood and the title of principal painter and made London his home until his death.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/nov/25/national-portrait-gallery-campaign-keep-van-dyck-uk

Reading Barry MacSweeney - review by Terry Kelly

Poet’s life is brought to book


Terry Kelly
Shields Gazette

03 January 2014

A BOOK about the life and work of a former Shields Gazette journalist is out now.

Barry MacSweeney, once deputy editor at the Gazette, died at the age of 51 in 2000 after a long battle with alcoholism.

Despite working as a journalist all his life in the North East and elsewhere in the UK, MacSweeney is better known as a poet.

Reading Barry MacSweeney, published by Northumberland-based Bloodaxe Books, examines the work of the Newcastle-born poet, including collections such as The Book of Demons and Pearl.

His first book, The Boy From the Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother, published by Hutchinson in 1968, sold thousands of copies, but as a 19-year-old, MacSweeney was put forward for the Oxford chair of poetry, a publicity stunt which backfired.

MacSweeney afterwards developed a distaste for the literary establishment, and most of his subsequent books were published by non-mainstream presses.

But his later poetry won a Paul Hamlyn Award and glowing reviews in leading UK journals, and an archive dedicated to his writing was created at Newcastle University in 2001.

Leading academics and friends contribute to Reading Barry MacSweeney, which looks at different aspects of his poetry, plus his personal life and love of rock music.

Editor Paul Batchelor writes: “A diverse range of writers – academics, poets, journalists and friends of MacSweeney – have been brought together to offer perspectives on this most protean, prolific and contradictory of poets.”

Contributors include his former Gazette colleague Terry Kelly.

Reading Barry MacSweeney is published by Bloodaxe Books, priced at £12.

http://www.shieldsgazette.com/what-s-on/poet-s-life-is-brought-to-book-1-6348290

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #234

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Dennis Wilson: The Mayor of Washington Boulevard

Dennis Wilson: The Mayor of Washington Boulevard
In our latest visit to the archives of Rock's Backpages, we bring you a 2008 piece by Bill Bentley about the troubled later years of Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, who died 30 years ago this month

Bill Bentley
theguardian.com
Tuesday 31 December 2013

There's a problem in paradise. At the far left side of America, near a perfect spot of beach where bohemian Venice, Calif., blends into the tony Marina del Rey, all's not right on Washington Boulevard.

It's fall 1983, and things are turning crispy. Reaganomics has started to make itself seen and felt. Streets aren't being swept, and those trying to live on them no longer feel quite as welcome. Summer's over, and the crowds have left: gone back to school or the Midwest, where life might not be as exciting but is a whole lot safer.

There's even a new drug sneaking around the underground: crack cocaine. Those trying it are gone, and they're not coming back.

At the end of Washington is the Venice Pier. The serious fishermen show up at midnight and stay all night. They've got company from an assorted batch of 1960s hippies who couldn't quite figure out the 1970s and are now caught on the treadmill of chasing a hopeless high. When the marine layer is so thick that it blocks the morning sun and the Pacific Ocean has lost its summer joy, life down here edges more toward a nightmare than the promised land. Perfection has a downside, and this is where it lives.

One man among these street regulars still has a shine. Dennis Wilson helped create the California dream. As a youngster, he was a natural athlete, and once he discovered surfing, Wilson found his groove. His brothers, Brian and Carl, were starting a band, and their mother insisted they add Dennis as the drummer. Before long, the Beach Boys were playing teen hops and recording local hits. By 1963, they'd become America's most glorious group, and their drummer, even sitting in the back behind his swirly kit, was the one everyone wanted to be. He was a powerhouse, a pounder who sent out an animalistic strength, someone who carried himself like he knew he had few equals. Carl, Brian and singer Mike Love might have formed the front line, but Dennis Wilson was the Beach Boy. He knew it, and now he can't forget it.

Twenty years later, the curse of having everything has taken its toll. The drummer is no longer even allowed at Beach Boys shows. He's living on his past but doesn't seem to care. He made that deal a long time ago and now follows the thread to the very end. Some days he howls at the sun, gripped by walking dementia, and on others he's all smiles, with his new baby in a crushed-velvet stroller that probably costs as much as some cars. Or he'll pull up in front of Nick's liquor store in a cherried-out 1956 baby-blue T-bird convertible, leave it running, and hurry back out with a half-gallon of vodka he's stolen from behind the counter, cackling like he just graduated from the cuckoo's nest.

We bump into each other for the first time on one of those days, literally, and he steps back like he's ready to take a swing. Wilson's eyes are flying saucers, spinning in their own orbit, though it's not even noon. I say hello and ask if it was hard playing a right-handed drum kit left-handed, hoping that takes the bite out of him. Obviously thrown, he pets the large dog at his side, looks at me sideways, and tells me that the animal can smell "queers", then jumps in the Thunderbird and roars off.

The next morning Wilson's back for more vodka, but without the dog. He sees me and smiles, like I passed the dog test. Relieved, I ask him about his 1977 solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue, and if he's going to make another one, telling him those songs are like white soul music from some secret planet. His eyes tear up, and I'm afraid he's going to have a nervous breakdown right there on the sidewalk.

"I can't," he says. "It hurt too much."

We go sit down on the low seawall, where he immediately jumps into the bottle of vodka. For the next hour, Wilson tells me how much that album meant to him and how many more songs he's got squirrelled away. He just doesn't have thick enough skin to try it again. "No one listened," he moans, "not even my brothers."

I can feel what's happened to him, the chance he took as the first Beach Boy to make a solo album and then having it largely ignored. Underneath the lion's glare, there's clearly the soul of a child that never grew up, one that's been patted on the head all his life as the problem brother, never heard. It wasn't really a surprise when Dennis Wilson died a few months later. As one of his close friends said, "He drowned way before he ever hit the water."

He was running out of options in December 1983, living on a boat in Marina del Rey. He dove beneath it – said to be looking for an old photo of third wife Karen Lamm – and didn't resurface. Or so the legend goes.

For many, that was the end of the original Beach Boy, Dennis the man who brought one of the biggest rock & roll bands of all time to life. Like all great legends, that's not where this one ends, because through the sonic miracle of reissues, Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue has come back to life 31 years later in glorious expanded form from Sony's Legacy Recordings. There's now a chance to hear how much more there was to the black sheep of the Wilson clan, the one who did everything from befriending Charles Manson to living with Fleetwood Mac's Christine McVie.

It turns out that, deep in his heart, Dennis Wilson was a true believer in the power of love and was able to create songs of such sophistication that many musicians didn't believe they were his. Beneath all the headlines of fast cars, wild women and bountiful drugs was a composer, someone who spent endless months in his Brothers Studio in Santa Monica, chasing the music in his head even more than he did the hedonistic lifestyle he helped conceive. The first track on Pacific Ocean Blue is River Song, and for those who listened in '77 when it was released, the music felt like a jolt to the mind. By then, the Beach Boys were trying to reinvent themselves with each new album, sometimes with more exciting results than others. There were different versions, whether Brian Wilson was really "back" or not, but it was obvious the band was being torn in different directions. 

What was amazing about POB was the singular strength of its vision. It was like the drummer had been taking night classes and suddenly became the star student. His voice may have been shredded around the edges, but the depth of Dennis Wilson's feelings was floating right on the surface. The man who played the drums like he was in the middle of a bar fight was transformed into someone who was ready to take our hand and lead us into the light of love.

As the album's songs progress, they start sounding like the great lost Beach Boys album, one that had been submarined because the singer wouldn't behave. You and I, Time, Dreamer, Rainbows, and Thoughts of You could take their places on any of Brian Wilson's long-players and hold their own.

Even when the recordings drift toward an overclutter of players, there's always a force of vision that keeps the sound centered and moving forward. By the end, Pacific Ocean Blue stands as a landmark in the Wilson family's history, and its lack of success didn't stop Dennis from chasing his California dream.

A second album's worth of songs was started, to be called Bambu, and makes up a second disc of the POB reissue. By then, Wilson's voice was falling victim to continuing abuse, and he couldn't catch his breath long enough to stop the slide into self-destruction. He had changed producers but lost some of his vision. Family battles kicked in harder, and the drummer saw his place in the band shrinking. By the start of the 1980s, he was MIA onstage and spending more time with the street characters in Venice than with the band he had inspired into being.

Many would say Dennis Wilson lived a tragic life, and depending on how you keep score, they'd be right. He died at 39, with a string of defeats behind him. He also accomplished more than anyone ever predicted. During the 1960s, the young musician from Hawthorne, Calif., had the run of Hollywood, his generosity preceding him everywhere he went. There are hundreds of Dennis Wilson stories still told in the city, and when the sun's out and the surf's up in Venice, the man's spirit comes in with each wave. His brother Brian is adamant that Dennis' talent equals his own.

"He might have looked out a different window than me and Carl," says Brian Wilson today, "but he had the biggest view. I loved him so much."

Fall 1983, I was asked to write and record a spoken-word piece for an album called Neighborhood Rhythms. The assignment was to choose a subject that reflected where I lived. In the Venice/Marina del Rey area, that could only be Dennis Wilson. He was the mayor of Washington Boulevard, someone who'd walk down the street and draw a crowd, whether you knew who he was or not. Wilson had an inner spirit that radiated out, casting a spell on those around him. His secret was that he was just like everyone else, but more so, and that included his mad dash toward the finish line.

When the musician who sparked a million dreams drowned on 28 Dec 1983, my poem Marina Del Dennis felt like an obvious afterword, and I always thought it didn't really reflect his majesty. Yet there's a beginning and end to every life, we find out, and while Wilson's final days may not have been pretty, they were always real, which is what made him the happiest of all. Life isn't for everybody, it's said, but for so many years, Dennis Wilson lived his like he had invented his own dream.

MARINA DEL DENNIS
by Bill Bentley (1983)

"My dog smells queers," he says
The voice scraped dry from swigging malted sand
He's the dream kid at the tail end of America
Burnt red to a scruffy crisp
High and dry behind the wheel of a baby-blue T-bird
Now left to listen for a silent station on his holy radio
No way would Popeye be too proud of this beached boy
Prowling the street named after our most famous father George
"Colonel Smirnoff," I say
A southpaw living on cottage cheese and bad blood
Every day it's the same
Two eyes that go out with the tide while he salutes an invisible flag
No stripes, no stars, just a shaggy dog bar backed by an endless buzz
So what's left? Stick Old Glory in his skull
A few lit sparklers in each arm
And turn him toward the ocean for one last lonely dance
But drummer Dennis, the sweet and sour Marina menace
Has it figured different
There's no one behind him
No mosquitoes to swim in his ears or words to rain on his heart
That's the way it has to be when you're nearer the end than the start
"Don't worry baby, there's still the sun," he barks
I listen, he looks, we smile
While the surf applauds its most famous friend
Then with a wicked grin to match the new moon he asks,
"The dog smells junkies
How much for the dog?"
There are no takers tonight in Marina del Rey

© 1983 Erastus Street Publishing
© Bill Bentley, 2008

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/dec/31/dennis-wilson-rocks-backpages

Thanks to Ally for this one!

Jimmy Webb Wednesday

Simon Hoggart RIP

Simon Hoggart, Guardian and Observer journalist, dies aged 67
Humorous and often acerbic columnist, who chronicled the folly of politicians for four decades, dies from pancreatic cancer

Michael White
The Guardian

Monday 6 January 2014

Simon Hoggart, one of the wittiest and most distinctive writers on the Guardian and Observer for 45 years, has died from pancreatic cancer, it was announced on Sunday. He was 67 and had managed to work and lead an active social life for three and a half years after being told his condition would prove fatal.

It was only in December that complications arising from the disease in combination with another round of chemotherapy forced Hoggart to give up writing the Guardian's parliamentary sketch – which he had done for 20 years – as well as his popular Saturday column. His final article, a review of the year just ending, appeared on 19 December. It was a waspish summary in which he noted that, while Pope Francis "may have renounced his own infallibility", Margaret Thatcher never did.

Though he got home to his family in west London late on Christmas Day, Hoggart soon returned to the Royal Marsden hospital, where he died on Sunday afternoon. Until the last few days visitors had found him sounding off, as usual, against favourite targets – the folly of politicians, publishers and privatised train companies, the pleasures of food and drink, the stupidity of manufacturers' safety warnings. He remained determined not to give up, nor to let his illness become widely known lest it detract from the laughter he always sought to generate.

The elder son of Richard Hoggart, the literary and cultural academic, Simon Hoggart joined the Guardian straight from university in 1968. He rapidly emerged as a journalistic polymath whose career ranged from covering the Troubles in Northern Ireland and five years as the Observer's Washington correspondent to writing about politics for Punch, and wine and television criticism for the Spectator.

A regular on many radio and TV programmes, Hoggart chaired Radio 4's The News Quiz for 10 years before 2006. He published 20 books and anthologies and became a regular figure on the festival circuit. Though a resourceful news reporter and feature writer with an eye for telling detail and a vivid turn of phrase, he found his most comfortable niche as a humorous, usually acerbic columnist, notably as the Guardian's sketchwriter, briefly in the 1970s and after his return to the Guardian from 12 years on the Observer in 1993.

In his final parliamentary sketch, the day after George Osborne's autumn statement, he likened the chancellor to Mr Micawber ( "In America the president's aides are scratching their heads and wondering how they can create their own British miracle") and wrote of David Cameron that "he smiled like the Cheshire Cat after a large sherry". Of Ed Balls's response, Hoggart declared: "If he had pretended to be any angrier he would have been coughing up his own intestines."

Hoggart's world view was shaped by his family roots in the industrial north of England. He knew Thatcher had made necessary reforms but felt she was neither evil witch nor national saviour, merely increasingly mad. He disliked New Labour ("if they ever invent a fat-free lard it would resemble a New Labour MP") and thought Tony Blair a self-satisfied opportunist. "I sat in the front row for Tony Blair's (conference) speech. It was like the monsoon in a Somerset Maugham short story," he once wrote. John Major's curious vocabulary and sentence structure he routinely ascribed to the then-PM having learned English as a second language in a British Council office in rural Nigeria.

He also tormented John Prescott and Lib Dem ministers in general. But he could be kind when he decided a politician had risen to a difficult occasion and had his favourites. They included Sir Peter Tapsell, now father of the Commons, whose grandiloquent style of speech prompted Hoggart to suggest that monks must be writing down his every word on vellum.

The Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, said: "Simon was a terrific reporter and columnist – and a great parliamentary sketchwriter. He wrote with mischief and a sometimes acid eye about the theatre of politics. But he wrote from a position of sophisticated knowledge and respect for parliament. A daily reading of his sketch told you things about the workings of Westminster which no news story could ever convey. He will be much missed by readers and his colleagues."

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jan/06/simon-hoggart-guardian-observer-journalist-dies-67

Eusebio RIP

Eusébio obituary
Graceful footballer with a fearsome right foot and an astonishing goal-scoring record
 
Gavin McOwan
The Guardian
Sunday 5 January 2014

Eusébio, who has died aged 71, was the greatest African footballer in the history of the game. He moved from his native Mozambique to the Portuguese club Benfica in 1961, blazing a trail from poverty to stardom that scores of young African footballers would follow, though none since has played with such grace or reached the benchmark he set.

He was the prototype of a complete 21st-century striker, decades ahead of his time; a superb athlete (he ran the 100 metres in 11 seconds at the age of 16) with explosive acceleration who could leave defenders trailing in his wake. He could also dribble, was good in the air and possessed a fearsome and highly accurate right foot.

His scoring record was astonishing. In 15 years at Benfica he scored an incredible 473 goals in 440 competitive games, plus many more in friendlies. He was top scorer seven times in the Portuguese league and was European Golden Boot winner twice. In his only appearance in the World Cup finals, in England in 1966, he won the Golden Boot for top scorer of the tournament, with nine goals in six games.

Eusébio da Silva Ferreira was born in the colonial capital of Lourenço Marques (present-day Maputo), the son of Laurindo António da Silva Ferreira, a white Angolan railroad worker, and Elisa Anissabeni, a black Mozambican. His father died when Eusébio was eight, and he was brought up in poverty before being signed by Sporting Clube de Lourenço Marques, a feeder club of Sporting Lisbon, at the age of 15.

Word of the prodigy soon spread beyond his home town – in fact his destiny was determined in a Lisbon barber shop. It was there that a coach from the Brazilian club São Paulo, who was touring Mozambique and later Portugal, waxed lyrical to an old friend about a young Mozambican he had spotted. The friend was Benfica's legendary coach Béla Guttmann, and he was so impressed with what he heard that the following week he flew to Mozambique and persuaded Eusébio's family to let him sign for Benfica.

This happened right under the noses of Benfica's rivals, Sporting, who disputed the legality of the transfer. Such was the ill-feeling between the two Lisbon clubs that, on Eusébio's arrival in Portugal in December 1960, Benfica had to hide him in a fishing village in the Algarve and ordered him to stay in his hotel room. It took Benfica five months of legal wrangling to register him, but as soon as the ink on his contract was dry, the footballing world learned what all the fuss had been about.

Eusébio scored a hat-trick on his Benfica debut, in June 1961. Two weeks later, in a friendly match in Paris, the team faced the Brazilian club Santos, and their great striker Pelé. With Benfica losing 4-0 and with no chance of winning, Guttmann brought on Eusébio in the second half. Within 20 minutes, he had scored another hat-trick. Pelé, along with everyone else watching, sensed the arrival of a future great.

Benfica were then reigning European and Portuguese champions, but Eusébio forced his way into their formidable side the following season. At the end of that season the club retained the European Cup, defeating the mighty Real Madrid, unbeaten in their previous five finals and lead by Ferenc Puskas and Alfredo di Stefano, Eusébio's boyhood idol. The 19-year-old scored the last two goals in the 5-3 victory, and at the end of the game swapped shirts with Puskas, who had scored a hat-trick, a symbolic exchange between the game's greatest goal scorer and his heir apparent, before Benfica supporters carried their new king from the pitch on their shoulders. Europe's football writers voted him the continent's second-best player in his first full season as a professional.

Mozambique was a colony, Portuguese East Africa, until 1975, so Eusébio played his international career for Portugal. In England in 1966, he lit up the World Cup, outshining Pelé as the star of the tournament – though that was thanks partly to the brutal tackling of Eusébio's Portuguese team-mates, who literally kicked the Brazilian out of the tournament.

Eusébio scored twice in the 3-1 win over the reigning champions, Brazil, a game that set up the famous quarter-final with North Korea at Goodison Park. The underdogs were winning 3-0 until Eusébio almost single-handedly led the Portuguese recovery, scoring their first four goals in the eventual 5-3 victory.

In the semi-final, Portugal faced England at Wembley – though most English histories of the tournament gloss over the fact that this match had been scheduled for Goodison Park, where Portugal had already played twice and felt at home, until the English authorities connived to switch venues, forcing the Portuguese to catch a train to London the night before the match.

Eusébio was nullified by Nobby Stiles and England won 2-1, with Bobby Charlton scoring twice. Eusébio wept at the end of the game, and the occasion is still remembered as Jogo das Lágrimas (the Game of Tears) in Portugal. But even in defeat, Eusébio was the sensation of the World Cup.

He never again played in the finals of the World Cup, but two years later he was back at Wembley to face Manchester United in the European Cup final. Once again, Charlton scored two goals and inspired his team to victory, and again it was Stiles who marked Eusébio out of the game – rather more violently on this occasion.

Eusébio did have a chance to win the game in the dying minutes with a close-range shot on goal, but hit it straight at the United goalkeeper, Alex Stepney. It was typical of a man who always played in the Corinthian spirit that, even at a critical moment of such an important match, he put an arm around Stepney's shoulder to praise him for the save.

This was Eusébio's third European Cup final defeat in six years, after losing to AC Milan in 1963 and Inter Milan in 1965, and his last on the big stage, but he continued to win trophies and score goals for Benfica for another seven years. In 15 years with the club he won 11 league titles, five Portuguese cups, was European Player of the Year and the first player to win the European Golden Boot award in 1968, and again in 1973.

In the mid-70s Eusébio followed the well-trodden path then taken by ageing world-class players, to the burgeoning North American Soccer League, for one last lucrative payday. He turned out for Boston Minutemen, Las Vegas Quicksilvers and Toronto Metros-Croatia, helping the last to win the NASL title in 1976.

He lived in Portugal for the rest of his life (although he frequently returned to Mozambique, where he was hero-worshipped), acting as a football ambassador for both his adopted country and Benfica, where he is immortalised in a statue at the club's stadium, the Estádio da Luz.

He is survived by his wife, Flora, two daughters and several grandchildren.

• Eusébio da Silva Ferreira, footballer, born 25 January 1942; died 5 January 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/jan/05/eusebio

Phil Everly Tribute

Paul Simon on The Everly Brothers:

The roots of the Everly Brothers are very, very deep in the soil of American culture. First of all, you should know that the Everly Brothers were child stars. They had a radio show with their family, and their father, Ike, was an influential country guitar player, so he attracted other significant musicians to the Everlys' world — among them Merle Travis and Chet Atkins, who was instrumental in getting the Everlys on the Grand Ole Opry. Perhaps even more powerfully than Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers melded country with the emerging sound of Fifties rock & roll. They were exposed to extraordinary country-roots music, and so they brought with them the legacy of the great brother groups like the Delmore Brothers and the Blue Sky Boys into the Fifties, where they mingled with the other early rock pioneers and made history in the process.

The Everly Brothers' impact exceeds even their fame. They were a big influence on John Lennon and Paul McCartney — who called themselves the Foreverly Brothers early on — and, of course, on Simon and Garfunkel. When we were kids, Artie and I got our rock & roll chops from the Everlys. Later, as Simon and Garfunkel, we put "Bye Bye Love" on Bridge Over Troubled Water, and much later, Phil and Don both sang on the song "Graceland."

Before the Everly Brothers joined Artie and me on the road in 2003, Phil and Don had actually quietly retired three years earlier. They basically came out of retirement for us. I said, "Phil, look, if you're going to retire, you might as well come out one more time and take a bow and let me at least say what it is that you meant to us and to the culture."

You know, the Everlys have a long history of knocking each other down, as brothers can do. So in a certain sense, it was hilarious that the four of us were doing this tour, given our collective histories of squabbling. And it's amazing, because they hadn't seen each other in about three years. They met in the parking lot before the first gig. They unpacked their guitars — those famous black guitars — and they opened their mouths and started to sing. And after all those years, it was still that sound I fell in love with as a kid. It was still perfect.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100-greatest-artists-of-all-time-19691231/the-everly-brothers-20110420

Paul Simon on Phil Everly's death: 

“Phil and Don were the most beautiful sounding duo I ever heard. Both voices pristine and soulful. The Everlys were there at the crossroads of country and R&B. They witnessed and were part of the birth of rock and roll.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/arts/music/phil-everly-half-of-pioneer-rock-duo-dies-at-74.html?hpw&rref=arts&_r=0

Brian Wilson:

"My heart is so saddened by the passing of Phil Everly. I could never get enough of the Everly Bros voices. Love & Mercy to family & friends."

http://www.brianwilson.com/

Bob Dylan on The Everly Brothers:

"We owe these guys everything. They started it all."

http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/phil-everly-of-the-everly-brothers-dies-at-74-1.2483880

Linda Ronstadt:

"They had that sibling sound... The information of your DNA is carried in your voice, and you can get a sound [with family] that you never get with someone who’s not blood related to you. And they were both such good singers - they were one of the foundations, one of the cornerstones of the new rock 'n' roll sound."

http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2014/01/phil_everly_musical_broth.php

Mark Knopfler on The Everly Brothers:

Phil Everly, Half of a Pioneer Rock Duo That Inspired Generations, Dies at 74

By Jon Pareles
Published: January 4, 2014

Phil Everly, whose hits with his older brother, Don, as the Everly Brothers carried the close fraternal harmonies of country tradition into pioneering rock ’n’ roll, died on Friday in Burbank, Calif. He was 74.

The group’s official website said he died in a hospital near his home in Southern California. His son Jason said the cause of death was complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

With songs like “Wake Up Little Susie,” “Bye Bye Love,” “Cathy’s Clown,” “All I Have to Do Is Dream” and “When Will I Be Loved?,” which was written by Phil Everly, the brothers were consistent hitmakers in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They won over country, pop and even R&B listeners with a combination of clean-cut vocals and the rockabilly strum and twang of their guitars.

They were also models for the next generations of rock vocal harmonies for the Beatles, Linda Ronstadt, Simon and Garfunkel and many others who recorded their songs and tried to emulate their precise, ringing vocal alchemy. The Everly Brothers were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in its first year, 1986.

The Everlys brought tradition, not rebellion, to their rock ’n’ roll. Their pop songs reached teenagers with Appalachian harmonies rooted in gospel and bluegrass. Their first full-length album, “The Everly Brothers” in 1958, held their first hits, but the follow-up that same year, “Songs Our Daddy Taught Us,” was a quiet collection of traditional and traditional-sounding songs.

They often sang in tandem, with Phil Everly on the higher note and the brothers’ two voices virtually inseparable. That sound was part of a long lineage of country “brother acts” like the Delmore Brothers and the Monroe Brothers. In an interview in November, Phil Everly said: “We’d grown up together, so we’d pronounce the words the same, with the same accent. All of that comes into play when you’re singing in harmony.”

Paul Simon, whose song “Graceland” includes vocals by Phil and Don Everly, said in an email on Saturday morning: “Phil and Don were the most beautiful sounding duo I ever heard. Both voices pristine and soulful. The Everlys were there at the crossroads of country and R&B. They witnessed and were part of the birth of rock and roll.”

The Everly Brothers’ music grew out of a childhood spent singing. Phillip Everly was born in Chicago on Jan. 19, 1939, the son of a Kentucky coal miner turned musician, Ike Everly, and his wife, Margaret. The family had left Kentucky, where Don Everly was born in 1937, for musical opportunities in Chicago. They soon moved on to Iowa, where Ike Everly found steady work playing country music on live radio. In Shenandoah, Iowa, Ike Everly got his own show — at 6 a.m. on the radio station KMA — and in 1945, “Little Donnie” and the 6-year-old “Baby Boy Phil” started harmonizing with their parents on the air. They went to school after they performed.

The Everly family moved on to radio shows in Indiana and Tennessee. In 1955 the teenage brothers settled in Nashville, where they were hired as songwriters before starting the Everly Brothers’ recording career.

They had a blockbuster in 1957: “Bye Bye Love,” a song written by the husband-and-wife team Felice and Boudleaux Bryant. It reached No. 1 on the country chart, No. 2 on the pop chart and No. 5 on the rhythm and blues chart, selling over a million copies. They followed it with another Bryants song, “Wake Up Little Susie,” that was a No. 1 pop hit and another million-seller. For the next few years, they were rarely without a Top 10 pop hit. Among them were “All I Have to Do Is Dream” in 1957, “Bird Dog” and “Devoted to You” in 1958, “(Till) I Kissed You” in 1959, and, in 1960 “Let It Be Me,” “Cathy’s Clown” (written by Don and Phil Everly) and “When Will I Be Loved.”

Their hitmaking streak ended in the United States in the early 1960s, lasting slightly longer in Britain. But they continued to tour and make albums, notably the 1968 “Roots,” a thoughtful foray into country-rock that included a snippet of a 1952 Everly family radio show. They had a summer variety series on CBS in 1970.

But the brothers were growing estranged. In 1973, at a concert in California, Phil Everly smashed his guitar and walked offstage, and Don Everly announced the duo’s breakup. They recorded solo albums for the next decade before reuniting in 1983, with a concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London that was filmed as a documentary. They returned to the studio for a 1984 album, “EB84,” that was produced by the British pub-rocker Dave Edmunds and included a song written for the Everlys by Paul McCartney; they made two more studio albums in the 1980s.

Among musicians the Everlys had generations of admirers. The Beatles included Everly Brothers songs in their live sets and modeled the vocal harmonies of “Please Please Me” on “Cathy’s Clown.” The Beach Boys recorded the Everlys song “Devoted to You.” Linda Ronstadt had a Top 10 hit with “When Will I Be Loved” in 1975. On his four-album set “These Days” in 2006, the country songwriter Vince Gill recorded a duet with Phil Everly,“Sweet Little Corinna.”

Simon and Garfunkel included “Bye Bye Love” on their “Bridge Over Troubled Water” album, and years later brought together the Everly Brothers to be their opening act for their 2003 “Old Friends” tour. “I loved them both,” Mr. Simon wrote. “Phil was outgoing, gregarious and very funny. Don is quiet and introspective. When Simon and Garfunkel toured with the Everlys in 2003, Art and I would take the opportunity to learn about the roots of rock and roll from these two great historians. It was a pleasure to spend time in their company.”

The Everly Brothers played their last headlining tour in 2005 in Britain. They were also heard together on a 2010 album by Don’s son, Edan Everly, in a dark song about child stardom called “Old Hollywood.”

Phil Everly is survived by his brother and by their mother, Margaret Everly; his wife, Patti; his sons, Jason and Chris; and two granddaughters.

In 2013, younger musicians released two albums of Everly Brothers songs: “What the Brothers Sang” by Dawn McCarthy and Bonnie Prince Billy (the indie rocker Will Oldham), and “Foreverly” by Norah Jones and Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day, a remake of every song on “Songs Our Daddy Taught Us.”

“The Everly Brothers go way back far as I can remember hearing music. Those harmonies live on forever,” Mr. Armstrong posted on Twitter.

“I always thought I’d be the one to go first,” Don Everly wrote in a statement to the Associated Press. “The world might be mourning an Everly Brother, but I’m mourning my brother Phil.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/arts/music/phil-everly-half-of-pioneer-rock-duo-dies-at-74.html?hpw&rref=arts&_r=0

See:  http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/phil-everly-rip.html

Phil Everly RIP

Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers dies at 74
One half of the influential brothers whose harmonies left their mark on the Beatles, the Byrds and many others

theguardian.com

Saturday 4 January

Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers has died at the age of 74, the Los Angeles Times has reported.

Everly's high, close-harmony singing with his older brother, Don, made the Everly Brothers one of the biggest rock and country acts of the 1950s and early 1960s.

Everly died in the Los Angeles suburb of Burbank of complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, his wife Patti told the Times.

"We are absolutely heartbroken," Patti Everly told the paper. "He fought long and hard."

Representatives for Phil Everly could not immediately be reached for comment.

The Everly Brothers profoundly influenced 1960s-era artists ranging from Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who early in their careers called themselves the Foreverly Brothers, to Simon and Garfunkel, the Byrds, the Hollies and the Beach Boys.

"Perhaps even more powerfully than Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers melded country with the emerging sound of 50s rock & roll," Rolling Stone magazine said in placing the duo at No 33 on its list of the 100 greatest artists."

Phil and Don had an onstage breakup in 1973 that led to a decade-long estrangement, but Phil later told Time magazine their relationship had endured.

"Don and I are infamous for our split," Phil said, "but we're closer than most brothers. Harmony singing requires that you enlarge yourself, not use any kind of suppression. Harmony is the ultimate love."

Phillip Everly was born on 19 January 1939, in Chicago, the son of two country musicians, Ike and Margaret Everly.

The Everlys, backed by The Crickets, in 1961

With Ike Everly on guitar, the family was a traveling act and had a radio show in which Phil and Don performed between commercials for XIP rat poison and Foster's 30-minute Wonder Corn and Callus Remover. The legendary Nashville guitarist Chet Atkins was one of their earliest supporters.

"One thing that impressed me when I met those kids was that they were so intelligent," Atkins said on the Everly family fan site. "Don and Phil used proper English and I just thought they were a cut above ... intellectually and education-wise."

Their breakthrough hit, Bye Bye Love, came in 1957 and rose to No 2 on the US charts. It was their first million-seller and the first of numerous Everly tunes written by Boudleaux Bryant and his wife Felice, including, All I Have to Do Is Dream, Wake Up Little Susie and Devoted to You.

Wake Up Little Susie, also released in 1957, was their first No 1 hit. A song about two teenagers falling asleep at the drive-in and waking up long after curfew, it was banned in Boston for its ever-so-slightly suggestive lyrics.

In 1960 the brothers signed with a new record label, Warner Brothers, agreeing to a 10-year, $1 million contract and making their debut with their own song, Cathy's Clown, but by then their career was in decline.

The Beatles may have led to the clean-cut brothers' undoing in the tumultuous 1960s, but they were on a downward path at least a year before the Fab Four exploded on the scene, according to the Country Music Hall of Fame, which inducted the Everlys in 2001.

"They broke with [record producer] Wesley Rose in 1961, moved to California, and began making singles that were probably too experimental for the time," it said, also citing a slowdown in touring and a loss of access to the Bryants' songs due to a split with the music publishing firm Acuff-Rose.

But the songs lived on through some of the biggest acts of the era, including Simon and Garfunkel, who recorded Bye Bye Love on their 1970 hit album, Bridge over Troubled Water.

Art Garfunkel told Rolling Stone that the brothers' harmonising had taught him that "every syllable can shine".

"They were Kentucky guys with beautiful, perfect-pitch harmonies and great diction. All those vowels and consonants, those s's and t's, every one of them killed me," he said.

In 1973, with both suffering health and stress problems from years of touring, the Everlys broke up during a concert at Knott's Berry Farm amusement park in Buena Park, California.

"Phil Everly threw his guitar down and stormed off the stage during a performance of Cathy's Clown, leaving Don to tell the stunned audience the group was finished," Rolling Stone said.

In September 1983, after a decade of solo projects, they reunited for a show at London's Royal Albert Hall.

The brothers drew critical acclaim, and the concert yielded an album and a DVD.

The Everlys released EB 84 in 1984 to more acclaim and scored a minor hit with the album's On the Wings of a Nightingale, written for them by Paul McCartney.

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/jan/04/phil-everly-brothers-dies-74

I'm sure this will be added to later in the day.

The Ghost Singers of Hollywood

Marni Nixon - the 'real' Deborah Kerr and Audrey Hepburn and...

Secret Voices of Hollywood

I suppose we all know that Audrey Hepburn didn't do the actual singing in My Fair Lady, but it turns out the practice was widespread, especially for the female co-stars, as this fascinating documentary reveals..

In many of Hollywood's greatest movie musicals the stars did not sing their own songs. This documentary pulls back the curtain to reveal the secret world of the 'ghost singers' who provided the vocals, the screen legends who were dubbed and the classic movies in which the songs were ghosted.

Marni Nixon*, Betty Noyes and Bill Lee aren’t household names... but they should be. During a prolific era of “ghost-voicing” in Hollywood musicals, they sang as, respectively, Audrey Hepburn, Debbie Reynolds and Christopher Plummer. This bewitching documentary pulls back the curtain on a controversial technique that has gone the way of the ark (for better or worse, non-singing actors now have a stab, viz: Moulin Rouge!, Mamma Mia! and Les Misérables).

As far as the movie moguls were concerned, it was a trade secret and should remain one. This meant that, for years, cinemagoers thought that Natalie Wood was actually singing as Maria in West Side Story, and Mark Lester in the lead role of Oliver! The former was famously disgruntled at being sung over (her own version of I Feel Pretty, heard here, is fine, if a little thin). Lester, on the other hand, was thrilled at his perfect pitch (courtesy of Kathe Green, daughter of the film’s musical director). As Lester now says, “You wouldn’t want me to sing. It would destroy that wonderful image of that little boy singing. Just don’t go there!”

As for the invisible singers, there’s a happy ending. It’s very much a case of credit where credit is due.

http://www.radiotimes.com/episode/cnwn6n/secret-voices-of-hollywood

Not sure why Robert Wagner features so heavily, though...

Available on BBC iPlayer until 14 January: http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b03bxrxj/

* mother of Andrew Gold!

John Fortune RIP

John Fortune obituary
Comedian and actor best known for the satirical television show Bremner, Bird and Fortune

Michael Coveney
The GuardianTuesday

31 December 2013

John Fortune, who has died aged 74 after a long illness, was a distinguished member of the Oxbridge generation of brainy comedians who turned British entertainment inside out in the early 1960s, along with his friend, college contemporary and writing partner, John Bird, as well as Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, David Frost, Eleanor Bron and John Wells.

From his earliest days on Ned Sherrin's Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life, the successor in 1964-65 to the satirical television magazine That Was the Week That Was, through to the comedy shows with Rory Bremner in the 1990s and beyond, he was a fixture of barely surprised indifference, with a wonderful line in deflationary, logical understatement. Tall and gangly, with a warm and ready smile but a performance default mode of aghast, beady-eyed and sharp inquiry, he seemed to make his points almost by accident; especially so when quizzing Bird's brilliantly evasive all-purpose civil servant, think-tank person or fat-cat businessman, Sir George Parr, in their improvised sketches on the state of politics and the economy.

These hilarious and deadly duologues appeared first in 1992 on Rory Bremner's show on BBC. In 1993 the trio moved to Channel 4, and then Bird and Fortune had their own series, The Long Johns (1995-97). The three joined forces again in Bremner, Bird and Fortune from 1999 onwards, the last full series coming in 2008.

The labyrinthine implications of the banking crisis, or the specific agonies of the international mortgage lending scandal absorbed within it, or the building of the £34bn Eurofighter to confront a Soviet Union that no longer exists in a war that nobody will start, skewered the absurdities of our capitalist culture better than any leader-writing commentator or opinion-monger.

While Bird blustered, Fortune faltered reasonably and unerringly to the obvious conclusions and a position of unassailable moral and intellectual probity. And he could do the same by adopting the opposite stance of a hopeless defender of the indefensible. His funniest "face" was one of amazed, "Go on, I can believe this only too well," deadpan as the evidence piled up and the audience were in stitches. "The wonderful thing about our defence policy," he said, "is that you only have to say what it is and everyone just laughs." And then he would shake his head and burst out laughing himself, mouth as thin as a razor and, as the critic John Walsh once said, a spectacular cocked eyebrow that made him look like an astonished pigeon.

Fortune was the son of Hubert William George Wood, a commercial traveller, and his wife Edna Maude Fortune. He was educated at the cathedral school in Bristol and King's College, Cambridge, where he read English (as did Bird), attended lectures by FR Leavis and performed in, and wrote, revues with Cook and Bron in the Footlights.

On graduating, he thought of working in adult education, but decided to help Cook open his Establishment Club in Soho instead. From 1961, he worked there, and then in the theatre and television for more than 50 years. He appeared in Alan Bennett's On the Margin sketch show in 1966 and in the same author's Forty Years On when it was revived much later on.

With Wells he wrote an outrageous comic novel, A Melon for Ecstasy (1971, its title derived from an old Turkish proverb, "A woman for duty, a boy for pleasure, but a melon for ecstasy"), and transformed his student-days friendship with Bird into a 1976 BBC sitcom, Well Anyway, in which the pair fetched up in a scruffy Earl's Court flat and discovered they didn't like each other, but that everyone else disliked them both even more. He and Bird appeared as the poet and the painter in Miller's 1981 BBC television version of Timon of Athens, starring Jonathan Pryce, but a theatrical tour in Frederick Lonsdale's On Approval constituted, for him at least, 11 weeks of misery. He was much happier when, in 2000, he joined Warren Mitchell and Ken Campbell in the 17th take-over cast of Yasmina Reza's Art, in which he played, gloriously deadpan, a dermatologist who has bought a blank white canvas for 200,000 francs.

He popped up in two Nigel Cole films, Saving Grace (2000) and the triumphant Calendar Girls (2003), and played John the chauffeur in Woody Allen's Match Point (2005). But he will be remembered best for his upright resistance to the hollow rhetoric and flim-flam in our public life, as when asked: while suffering a cardiac arrest, what is the first thing you need when you get to the hospital? "That's right, a parking space."

He described his hobby in Who's Who as "lounging about" and collected antique ethnic textiles as well as political gaffes and banalities. He was married first to Susannah Waldo in 1962 (the marriage was dissolved in 1976), with whom he had a son and a daughter; they, and his second wife, Emma Burge, whom he married in 1995, and their son, survive him.

• John Fortune, satirist and comedian, born 30 June 1939; died 31 December 2013

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/dec/31/john-fortune

Happy New Year!

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